Remote Control

by Stephen White

  Before she reached the top of the stairs the front door opened and a sweet, high-pitched voice said, “My goodness, you’re a brave one, aren’t you? Come on in, dear, you must be freezing your cheeks. We need to get you warmed right up.”

  Grateful for the enthusiastic greeting, Erin muttered, “Thank you, God. This almost makes up for having to spend another night schlepping Cozy.” She forced a smile onto her frozen face and tried to form words with her icy lips while she brushed snow off her clothing.

  Finally, with great effort, she managed to say, “Hello, I’m Erin Rand, I’m an investigator. I wonder if I might ask you a few questions about what happened here tonight.”

  “Not while you’re still outside, you can’t, dear. I simply won’t hear of it. It’s cold enough to freeze cats out there and I’ll be darned if I’m going to stand in this doorway and chat with you. Come in, come in. And don’t worry about the snow on your boots, all those others certainly didn’t.”

  Erin’s surprising hostess was a woman in her sixties. Erin pegged her as at least five-ten. She was elegant, with shoulder-length silver-blond hair, and wore a dressing gown that Erin suspected was made of cashmere. Her face was thin and pale and remarkably unwrinkled.

  The floor onto which Erin dripped melted snow was tiled with beautiful green marble. The entryway table was a stunning restored antique fruitwood.

  But at least two aberrations to this picture of wealth and sophistication were immediately apparent to Erin.

  First, her hostess’s deep blue irises were swimming in a sea of red, wormy lines.

  And, second, her gorgeous house reeked of cannabis.

  “Leave those boots right where they are and follow me, dear.” Erin gladly shed her footwear and followed the woman, who still had not introduced herself, down a hallway toward the back of the house. On the way they passed a living room and a dining room furnished as tastefully as the foyer. When the woman reached a closed door toward the end of the hallway, she reached up and put an index finger in front of her mouth to shush Erin, who was already feeling as speechless as she ever got, anyway.

  “Arnold is in there,” she whispered. “He doesn’t know about any of this.” Erin found herself wondering what species Arnold might be. She guessed potbellied pig.

  The room at the end of the hallway did not disappoint Erin, who quickly concluded that it wouldn’t have disappointed Martha Stewart, either. The kitchen was spacious and charming, with big windows that would welcome the morning light. An octagonal sunroom adjoined the kitchen. “Sit, sit,” said the woman, pointing Erin toward a big round table cluttered with a few days’ worth of newspapers.

  Erin said, “I’m so sorry, but I didn’t catch your name.”

  “I’m Lois, dear. Always have been.”

  “Lois…?” The investigator in Erin wanted a last name.

  Lois smiled. Her teeth were in fine shape.

  “Well, hello, Lois, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your hospitality, inviting me in, and—”

  At the mention of hospitality, Lois squeaked, “Oh,” and was off to the kitchen as though she had just remembered she had left something cooking on the stove. She reached for this and grabbed that, frantically trying to assemble some refreshments for her guest. She threw open cabinet doors and mounted a frontal assault on the refrigerator. Erin stared, her mouth as wide open as Lois’s pantry, at the speed with which the woman was putting together a tray of food.

  “I would have just left these things out earlier, but I really thought I was done entertaining for tonight. My, my, I apologize. Do you eat fish in the evening? Some people don’t. Personally, I sleep alone these days so it doesn’t make any difference if my breath smells like an old cat food can.”

  Lois stopped and performed a neat pirouette in order to face Erin, who had pulled her hat from her head and was shaking out her fine blond hair. Lois eyed her guest approvingly, placed her hands on her hips, and cocked her head just a little. “Now, you’re a pretty one, aren’t you? I would wager that—unlike this old woman—the right side of your bed is never cold for too long. I always like to sleep on the left, don’t you? Women should, I think. Arnold always thought he should have the side closest to the window. That makes no sense, does it? Left side women, right side men, I say.” She paused, pondering something. “Though I don’t know what the lesbians do. Now, that’s a problem. I’ll have to think about it some more. On second thought, looking at you, although it really is none of my business, maybe you should forget the smoked trout and stick to the Gouda. That would do fine, don’t you think? And the gherkins shouldn’t offend anyone too much, I wouldn’t think. Although they can be just a little aromatic. I still have a plentitude of coffee. But if you’re the iced tea type I can manage that as well, thank you very, very much.”

  Erin couldn’t fathom what a polite response to Lois’s soliloquy might be. She said, “Coffee sounds wonderful. Who’s Arnold?”

  “Cream?”

  “No, no cream, thank you.”

  Lois searched in the refrigerator and said, “Just as well, I’m out of cream. You’ll have to have your coffee without milk.” Immediately, she changed her voice to a whisper. “Everybody knows my Arnold, everybody.” Her eyes shifted away from Erin for a split second, down the hall toward the closed door.

  “I’m sort of new in town,” Erin said. She wasn’t. “How does everyone know him?”

  “From the greenbelt, dear. My Arnold is known as the ‘father of the greenbelt.’” She spoke with naked pride about this. “Look out that window behind you. That’s Arnold’s doing. He was the driving force behind preserving the mountain backdrop for Boulder.”

  Obligingly, Erin looked outside. She saw white. “Really? The green-belt was his idea?”

  “His idea. His organizing. His politicking. His arm-twisting. His vision.”

  “I didn’t know. It was before my time, obviously, but I’m terribly grateful to him.”

  “We all are, dear. We all are.”

  Lois placed a lacquered tray right in front of her guest. Erin flaked some trout and placed it on a cracker, took a bite.

  Lois watched intently. “You do sleep alone, too, don’t you? I’m so sorry. You’ll find someone, dear, don’t worry.”

  “No need to be sorry, it’s by choice, currently. I get offers, Lois. Though most of them aren’t worth giving up smoked fish over, if you know what I mean.”

  “Do I ever.”

  “Can we talk a little about what happened here tonight?” Erin tried to make a charming face to go along with the abrupt change in subject.

  “Yes, of course,” Lois said, opening her eyes wide. Erin thought they looked like dirty brake lights. “You’re not with the police, are you?”

  “No, I’m a private investigator.”

  “Do you work for Emma?”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t say who my client is. Do you know Emma Spire?”

  “Of course I do. She’s my neighbor. That’s her house right next door. I’m not the type who ignores my neighbors, famous or not.”

  Erin couldn’t have picked her neighbors out of a police lineup. She envied Lois’s view of the world.

  “Were you home all evening?”

  “I couldn’t very well leave Arnold, could I?”

  “Arnold is not well?”

  Lois shook her head.

  Oh God. Erin saw a digression looming and chose to press her agenda as forcefully as she could, hoping to keep her hostess on track. “So you were home all evening. What did you see?”

  “Next door? Or out in the street?”

  Thinking, this is great, Erin said, “Either, both.”

  Lois stood and took Erin’s hand. “Come on, let me show you something. This will be fun.”

  Erin’s optimism took a dive. Maybe this will be fun, though it no longer looks like it is going to be particularly useful. The alternative, however, was a return to the blizzard, and the likelihood that the frightened, grouchy neighbors who share
d this block with Lois would soon be slamming their front doors in Erin’s face.

  The room where Lois led Erin had once been a tiny bedroom, the kind of ten-by-eleven-foot cell that architects sentenced bunk-bedded children to in the late fifties. Lois and Arnold’s children were long gone, though, and Lois had reclaimed the intimate little space with a vengeance.

  If the telltale odor of cannabis was apparent to Erin elsewhere in the house, she thought that this cubicle smelled like a marijuana humidor. Cozy’s reggae guru, Bob Marley, could have been happily entombed in this room.

  “This is my retreat—my personal retreat—and I like fabric,” Lois announced. “Yards and yards and yards of it. Arnold would absolutely hate this room.”

  The room was cloaked in cloth. Florals and paisleys, tapestries and plaids. Upholstery, draperies, throws—fabric everywhere.

  “He hasn’t seen it?”

  “Besides his kidney problem, Arnold has glaucoma.” She said this as though to remind Erin of something she already knew and should not have forgotten. “It’s so sad. But if he saw this room once, he would never come back in here. Too floral for Arnold. He gravitates more toward leather and buffalo and antlers and things.” She mused wistfully. “Arnold actually doesn’t gravitate much anymore at all, if you know what I mean.”

  Erin didn’t but smiled politely.

  In weather other than a whiteout, the room was blessed with a remarkable view of Arnold’s and Lois’s prized greenbelt. In front of the window, Lois had arranged an impressive assortment of binoculars, telescopes, and cameras, both still and video. “My hobby is monitoring the greenbelt for wildlife and birds. Arnold and I believe that the next political attack on Boulder’s open space is on the near horizon and that we can’t have too much information ready to fight back. I keep detailed records of the wildlife. Sit, sit.”

  Erin did, on a comfortable overstuffed chair covered with a floral chenille. She was captivated by the relative calm that had come over her hostess as soon as they had entered her sanctuary.

  “I saw it.”

  “What?” asked Erin.

  “Tonight. What happened. The man, the gunshot, the truck. I try to keep an eye on my neighbors. Especially Emma. She’s too young to be living alone in such a large house, don’t you think? She’s a sad one. She’s someone who would never eat smoked fish at night. She could learn something from you. Maybe…maybe you two could be roommates.”

  Erin deflected Lois past another fork in her meandering road. “You saw the gunshot tonight? Do the police know about this?” Erin swept her eyes around Lois’s room.

  Thank you, Sam Purdy. Thank you.

  “Of course not. I couldn’t very well invite the police in here, now, could I? I smoke dope in this room, dear. Can’t you smell it? I could hardly bring them in here with this aroma. For all intensive purposes, I’m a criminal, am I not?”

  Erin tripped over Lois’s idiom, quickly deciding that this sweet lady had already managed to come to terms with her life of crime.

  “But then again, I didn’t really want to leave the police totally in the dark about what happened. So I gave them some hints. They seem smart, especially the big one. They’ll figure it out.”

  “You gave the police some hints?”

  “That’s right.” Lois was lighting up a joint that was rolled as tightly as a crayon. “Would you like a hit, dear? We’ll talk.”

  The jail nurse was a thirty-five-year-old black woman who had cut her health care teeth starting impossible IVs on impossibly blown veins in impossibly small bodies in a pediatric oncology center. For most of a decade she had labored there handing out emesis basins, holding tiny hands, and wiping away tears, too often her own. Demain Jones knew exactly what suffering was and precisely what “unfair” meant in the human lexicon of tragedy, and she had absolutely no patience for inmates who whined.

  She greeted Lauren with a half-smile. It was Demain Jones’s standard skeptical greeting for inmates. She figured that maybe half of the patients who walked into her infirmary actually belonged there, so she figured it was only fair to smile halfway until she determined which camp the current con belonged in.

  With the deputy parked on a chair along one wall the nurse proceeded to examine Lauren. After retiring from peds oncology, Demain Jones had gone back to school and earned a degree as a physician’s assistant. She was accomplished at physical exams and performed one on Lauren while peppering her with questions about her health history. Lauren knew the routine as well as she knew how to file a motion to suppress and was impressed with the nurse’s thoroughness.

  At the end of the workup, Jones reexamined Lauren’s eyes and rechecked her reflexes, especially on the bottoms of her feet.

  Demain Jones took a quick glance over at the deputy who was accompanying Lauren, then leaned forward as though she were about to check Lauren’s eyes again. Looking straight into them without her scope, Demain said, in a tame voice laced with concern, “Honey, you know you have a positive Babinski?”

  Lauren blinked, said nothing.

  Demain Jones intended the pronouncement as a test to see how this patient of hers would react. Demain still wasn’t sure whether Lauren was being straight with her. “You know what that means, having a positive Babinski?”

  Lauren shrugged.

  “One of two things. Either means you are the world’s largest new-born baby, or you have something seriously wrong with your central nervous system.”

  Lauren was unwilling to give herself away. She tried to appear appropriately perplexed.

  Demain Jones took a step back. “I was about to authorize a transfer to Community Hospital so that an ophthalmologist could take a look at those smoky eyes of yours, but I’m beginning to think that wouldn’t be the right thing to do.”

  Lauren wanted desperately to get out of the county jail. “My vision is awful.”

  The nurse sighed. “Oh, I believe that. Your pupils have about as much in common as me and my ex-husband. And you can’t track your own finger well enough to pick a basketball off your nose.”

  Lauren nodded, relieved that they were finally on the same page.

  Demain Jones lowered her voice. In Lauren’s ears it seemed to rumble. “Sister, don’t you dare try to hustle me. You don’t have the skills to hustle me. I spend five dark nights a week smellin’ lies. Only the very best liars have even a chance to scam me. Now, be straight, hon, exactly what kind of doc should I be sending you to? It’s not an ophthalmologist you need, is it?”

  Lauren swallowed. “I probably need to see a…neurologist.” Lauren hesitated, recognizing an opportunity, and she made an impulsive decision to try to take advantage of it. “And a urologist, too.”

  “A urologist?” Jones said skeptically. She had already surmised the neurology part.

  Lauren leaned toward the nurse and whispered, “I haven’t been able to pee.”

  “You have a diagnosis?”

  “No,” Lauren lied. “I’m being followed. They’re ruling things out. You know what that’s like.”

  “Mmmm mmm. I bet they are. You have names?”

  “Of what they’re ruling out?”

  “Doctors’ names.”

  “The doctors? Yes.”

  “Let’s have ’em, honey.”

  Lauren gave Nurse Jones the name of her neurologist, Dr. Larry Arbuthnot—“I’m sorry, you are going to have to spell that one for me”—and her neighbor Dr. Adrienne Arvin, a urologist.

  As she walked away from Lauren to consult with the deputy, Jones turned back and said, “If it turns out you’re scamming me, I’m going to come and get you and we are going to be cellmates for a week and you are going to regret the day you were born.”

  Lauren couldn’t see Demain Jones’s face. If she could, she would have seen a smile in the nurse’s eyes.

  The sergeant from the booking room had to settle the dispute that soon erupted between the nurse and the deputy.

  Jones had called the jail physician, who was hom
e in bed, and who didn’t even bother to open his eyes before he authorized Lauren’s transfer to Community Hospital. Jones wanted Lauren transported to the hospital immediately. But the deputy argued that since the prisoner hadn’t yet been actually booked, she wasn’t officially in the custody of the county. That being the case, the Sheriff’s Department couldn’t transport her. The Boulder Police Department, the agency with legal custody, would have to arrange to have Lauren picked up and transported, or she would have to be booked first. Once she was booked a sheriff’s deputy could transport her. Since the paperwork of logging her in for booking hadn’t even started, a delay of ninety minutes was likely, and two hours was more realistic.

  Demain Jones said that simply wouldn’t do. She didn’t know what the hell was wrong with Lauren’s central nervous system but she didn’t want whatever it was that was currently simmering erupting to a full boil in her infirmary in the middle of the night during a blizzard.

  To complicate what was really becoming a pain-in-the-ass night shift, the booking sergeant had to cope with Lauren’s two defense attorneys, who were now pacing around the pit demanding access to their client.

  Scott Malloy finally arrived at the jail to log in his prisoner. The booking sergeant explained the situation to Malloy, and five minutes later, Lauren was hooked up again, moved to the backseat of Malloy’s car, and was on her way across town to Community Hospital’s emergency room.

  Alan Gregory had already called Larry Arbuthnot at home and apprised him of what was going on with Lauren, both legally and medically, so Dr. Arbuthnot was not surprised at the call from Demain Jones at the Boulder County Jail, informing him that one of his patients was in need of his attention in the ER at Community Hospital.

  Jones had a lot more questions for him.

  But he told her he had to run. Actually, what he had to do was to try to conclude making love to his wife before he lost any more of his erection.